Any momentum out there?

Hmm. More than two weeks have passed since the release of Leslie Kean’s “UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record,” the most ambitious attempt to kick-start a national dialogue on this issue in a generation. Let’s review the media reception:

Six days after publication, MSNBC featured an online display of — oh. Another piece on astronomer Seth Shostak. Talking about SETI. Again. Telling us how, with any luck, we’ll probably discover an ET signal within the next 25 years. Seth Shostak whose supremely uninformed take on UFOs — “Alien Hunter” — hit the shelves in the spring of 09.

Space.com’s home page has an entire folder dedicated to SETI. And even one labeled “Entertainment.” Where we can learn things like how the “Star Wars” films “have left a legacy no other blockbuster has surpassed.” But no folder for UFOs. Because, well, you know. Because.

Now, a lot of people believe corporate media is in cahoots with federal shadowmen to keep a lid on this issue. The truth is, the MSM doesn’t give a spit. Its interest is arbitrary and fleeting. Exhibit A: Preceding graph.

This birds-on-a-wire phenomenon also gave us yet another glimpse into the perils of “citizen journalism,” as if we needed it. Following Kean’s appearance on The Colbert Report, where she rolled pretty well with the Comedy Central host’s signature campfest, the top Google News item under “UFOs” was, at least for a moment, posted by some poor guy with something called entertainmentgather.com, who hadn’t read the book. The dude erroneously reported that Kean had claimed “thousands of people” had witnessed the 2006 Chicago O’Hare UFO incident. There’s more, but who cares.

Kean’s mention of the UFO that violated the airspace over one of America’s busiest airports generated an avalanche of queries the next day to transportation reporter Jon Hilkevitch, who broke the story in 2007 for the Chicago Tribune. Hilkevitch reiterated the veracity of his original reporting in a subsequent blog and video, and noted how the scoop produced a record 1.6 million Web hits. (Hint to Jon: If you’d done a followup on the analysis by aviation experts a few months later, you might’ve gotten even more.)

Whether or not this initial spasm of publicity can generate any self-sustaining momentum is anyone’s guess, but the cultural odds are against it. Three days after “On the Record” reached bookstores, the right-wing Web site of Andrew Breitbart was busy crowing, “Let’s face it, Democrats have for decades had more weirdos than a UFO convention.” Last Friday, liberal journo David Corn (Mother Jones, The Nation) opined that UFOs couldn’t possibly be real because nobody’s produced any legitimate pix.

Maybe the most depressing revelation was visiting the Sarasota Barnes & Noble to find the book on the bottom shelf of the New Age graveyard, a couple of inches off the floor, yet another testament to the growing irrelevance of bookstores. At last glance, “On the Record” was No. 65 in Amazon.com’s top 100 bestsellers, clearly without much help from the chains.

13 comments on “Any momentum out there?”

I feel funny being more optimistic than Billy, but I gotta say, I think Kean is getting an amazing amount of MSM coverage for a book — any book — in this electronic day and age. Is this not the most covered UFO book since Communion? (Really, I don’t know. Someone with more experience in the field, please address this question.)
I’ve watched and listened to every Kean interview I’ve come across and she’s doing a great job of making her point and staying on message. Hard to do when the person interviewing you has no knowledge of the subject.
> Andrew Breitbart … David Corn
What? No commentors accusing them of being CIA? You guys are no fun!
> visiting the Sarasota Barnes & Noble to find the book on the bottom shelf of the New Age graveyard, a couple of inches off the floor
I can report that The World’s Biggest Bookstore (that’s its actual name) in Toronto has many copies. Its UFO section occupies two shelves near the floor, it’s true, but Kean’s book is on the uppermost of the two, facing front, three columns wide (compared to Jim Marrs’ Alien Agenda, the next-most abundant book, which has only one column).
> Extremely naive.
PurrlGurrl is not the least bit naïve. All those issues are verified entities happening now that effect peoples lives (or at least vie for their leisure dollars). Aliens gotta give up the goods instead of whining about how we ignore them! Sheesh!

Let’s see how many other stories have gotten more traction . . . the Iraq pullout and the apparently worsening war in Afghanistan, the five year anniversary of Katrina and the work that still needs to be done on the Gulf Coast (and speaking of the Gulf Coast . . . BP, drilling moratoriums, etc.), “it’s the economy, Stupid” (stock market and job market woes), nationwide primaries considered to be microcosms of the November general elections, etc. And on the entertainment side of the news . . . the Emmies, the Palin-Beck sideshow, etc.

You honestly think UFOs are going to get traction against these stories? Come on. You can’t be that naive.

“I don’t expect in my lifetime to see any of these three come to pass. by John Casey”

Regrettably I have to agree with you John. I can only imagine that given the USA runs on $$$, only the drying-up of funds will force the DoD to go public in order to plead for more cash for R&D. But it looks like even a massive financial crisis and a phenomenal deficit are not enough to force this into the open. Whoever said it would take an act of god was probably right.

I should’ve made it clearer — Breitbart himself didn’t make that statement. It was a contributor named Warner Todd Huston. But given the lack of diversity on the Web site, I would imagine it received Breitbart’s stamp of approval.

Let’s face it, for Andrew Breitbart to be saying, “Let’s face it, Democrats have for decades had more weirdos than a UFO convention.” is an irony so deep that it is hard to fathom. But he may be suffering from an irony deficiency. I suspect like most koolaid drinkers, he doesn’t really grok that he drinks koolaid.

For the weirdo factor, I think a Tea Party rally has a UFO convention beat hands down: those people will believe any cockamamie thing!

Billy, iconoclasm is a hard row to sow. As I read recently a paradigm shift in consciousness generally happens one funeral at a time. So, how many dead guys does it take to get disclosure? I dunno, but I suspect my corpse will be worm food long before I get an answer.

Great writeup, as usual. Based on what I heard in her media interviews, it sounds like Ms. Kean’s book would be good material for the UFO initiate. Let’s hope it does well. She is an excellent journalist and has worked hard by hitting the media airwaves for coverage.

I, too, read the “entertainmentgather” guy’s (Tom Rose)blog article and Corn’s as well. Both are clueless. Both of their writeups were found mentioned in the UFO Chronicles blog. The funny thing is that I have a pro-UFO blog (which I am not promoting here) that is better than their uninformed crapola, yet none of my stuff ever gets mentioned in UFO Chronicles. Oh, well.

Leslie Kean is a great reporter, but in my opinion, no amount of reporting is going to make a dent in furthering disclosure. Look at Dana Priest’s three part story on Top Secret America in the WaPo earlier this month. She only scratched the surface of how much money is going down the rat hole of the military-industrial-intelligence complex during a massive recession and it got about zero notice in media of any kind.

What is needed is a legitimate whistleblower to drop verifiable documentation. But where would such a person go to? Even if a whistleblower came forward to, say, WikiLeaks, or even the WaPo, it wouldn’t go anywhere. Nothing could be verified and the editors would be rightly afraid of being the object of hoax or a disinformation campaign from our friends in the Company.

As far as I can, see there are only a few options, outside of a whistleblower, that would push disclosure: First, a hostile foreign government with access to UFO documentation could disclose to embarrass the U.S.; second, artefacts of an ET origin could be discovered and revealed before a lid could be closed on it; and, third, deliberate contact from ETs themselves.